


LACHRYMARY ACTS (the pyre)

by evilstories



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dude. He's Like. In A Coma., Grief/Mourning, Hard Dubcon, Human Sex Acts as Fetish, M/M, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Sexy Blasphemy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, post-Memnoch pre-Merrick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:27:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23813788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilstories/pseuds/evilstories
Summary: In the Summer of '98, a heatwave hangs over New Orleans; Lestat, after three years of motionlessness, seems to drift further than ever from reality; and Louis, long-loose around the edges, finally begins to unravel.
Relationships: Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac, Louis de Pointe du Lac/David Talbot
Comments: 18
Kudos: 38





	LACHRYMARY ACTS (the pyre)

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for this fic include: heavy discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation, discussion of self-harm and disordered eating behavior, references to past domestic abuse, references to present emotional manipulation+coercion & non-consensual somnophilia which tonally approaches necrophilia. These warnings are here for a reason.

"However, the underlying affinity between sanctity and transgression has never ceased to be felt. Even in the eyes of believers, the libertine is nearer to the saint than the man without desire." (Georges Bataille, _Erotism, Death and Sensuality_ )

**I.** August in New Orleans is the kind of slow-boil that makes a man strange. The oppressive heat casts a kind of quiet hysteria; and though the nights hang heavy with the promise of storm, little rain brings no true relief. Louis is well-familiar with the spell. Centuries ago, Death had crept through the courtyard to his unlocked door on a feverish night just like this: and spring grief, curdled into summer madness, had compelled him to let Death in. Just like that night, tonight is moonless, stars glittering clear and high like diamonds studded in blue velvet and the Garden District lies under the deep darkness of an eight-thirty dusk. Summer is uncomfortable for a vampire who never rises until the sun is well-set. As such, Louis is quick to leave the wavering neon lights of Bourbon Street behind, cutting a well-worn path through the backyards up Prytania, afraid as always of missing Lestat’s rising- not, of course, that Lestat does much rising anymore. 

St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage rises out of the plum-colored sky with its dozen dusty windows like cataract eyes. The squealing iron gate is still sunwarm beneath Louis’ palm, front yard an overgrown meadow of Queen Anne’s lace. Clover tickles his legs as he follows the cracked slate path, skirting the front-entrance around the left wing, along the property wall and into the back. Handsome red brick has been swallowed up by dark-green ivy; the sentinel set of angels on the front-step have begun to grow matching jackets of slimy moss. 

It is August 25, 1998, and it has been a long five years since anyone cared to care for this place. David had kept up a nominal effort, for a time- scrubbing the windows and sweeping the steps- but in his absence, St. Elizabeth’s has fallen gratefully into a graceful state of disrepair. The back courtyard’s grown wild, kitchen garden turned invasive; everywhere the green smells of herbs, mint and sage curling around Louis’ ankles. Iron trellises bend beneath their jasmine burdens and enormous tomatoes glow in the gloom like fat red jewels. The old willow whose branches creep along the inner wall is hung heavy with flowering oleander; strangled by its beautiful dependents, the tree has been dead for years. Its skeletal branches curve around the back-door of the building like cradling arms of a dessicated guardian, knighted in purple-and-white. 

These nights, David Talbot has other graves to keep. Stagnant air envelops as Louis lets himself into the back foyer. The musty smell of old wood washes over him, hot dust; he wraps his arms around himself in a self-soothing gesture which wards off the chill of stale humidity. Though the old stones remain eerily cold all year long, trapped within these walls is all the suffocating heat of New Orleans: it is lucky for David he moved out in spring. Lucky for the only remaining tenant that he doesn’t do much _breathing_ anymore, either. 

David has taken to reminding Louis a little incessantly that what Lestat _does_ or _does not do_ means nothing at all. And Louis has taken to rising like the daytime moon- faint, pale, and uncomfortably pre-punctual- so as to bypass the usual fussing: David’s waiting for him, his offers of the shared hunt and Louis’ inevitable refusals. Louis is sure that this late in the evening David has certainly already noticed his absence; certainly already gone out to attend to his own needs. Though he is gifted with the maturity of mortal age (and the patience of powerful blood), his relative youth makes self-abnegation difficult. He tends to eat early. 

But Louis’ self-denial is the practice of centuries. An old pro at resisting temptation, he has always preferred to delay the event as much as possible; and he’s been on such a good roll, lately. It is easy to forget oneself when one prioritizes what is more important. 

_When he wants to get up,_ David says, _Lestat will come to us._

Louis crosses to the front face of the building via a long hall lined, on one side, with soaring windows whose lace curtains congeal with dust. In its abandonment the old orphanage-nee-convent has achieved a sort of grace which Louis is not sure could have ever existed under care: the ruins seem to sigh with relaxation, finally devoid of purpose and free to grow comfortable in the Earth. Louis empathizes. Though the uncanny emptiness of these arched halls- whitewashed walls usually all awash with moonlight- _should_ be spooky, he finds the solitude comforting. Peaceful as grave-dust. Though there _are_ many places he stays out of. Places David left unaltered, in his tenancy as caretaker; dollhouse rooms to which it seems the doll might return any minute. 

The touch of her faith is everywhere here. As if she in her absence has become another of St. Elizabeth’s ghosts, it seems often as if Dora is still present- as if she might step, barefoot in her white nightgown, at any moment from behind the curve of an open door. 

But this temple is no longer consecrated by her. She’d left it all to _him_ : every specter and relic belongs to Lestat, and in his absence to _them_ \- the only ones left to make some myth from all this misery. This is a place without narrative, a setting for a story whose protagonist is missing- only witnesses left and nothing to witness. There is no _present_ here, only infinite past; everyone who enters becomes a little more of a ghost. Four summers ago, David had said: _the attic needs to be fortified for structural integrity,_ and in the course of those routine repairs they had discovered a tiny dress, a tiny pair of shoes, a tiny pair of knickers walled up in a hidden space behind the drywall. 

Though he is no witch or psychic, Louis can tell these halls are more than Christ-haunted. He had ventured briefly into the attic in 1995 to store some of her old possessions and has stayed out ever since. He reaches the front of the building, and the stone steps of the North ‘tower’ echo his footfalls eerily as he ascends. On the first landing, Louis’ least-favorite plaster Christ- a brilliantly colorful affair from Latin America- stares serenely ahead with His inscrutable painted gaze, and not for the first time does Louis consider turning the Son of God towards the wall like a doll with a too-spooky face. 

And anyway like most mystics Dora wound up distracted from Earthly concerns by the call of God. Louis does wonder on occasion what the Vatican has done with her spurious Veil of Veronica- he supposes she must have gotten her great victory after all. Otherwise, she’d be back in this museum of theological failures with the rest of them. 

The irony that this place has been left to _his_ care does not go over Louis’ head. He knows he is a poor caretaker for such holy ghosts. David _believes_ better, at least: there is some trace of faith in him, some hope for the future yet. Louis is betting on entropy. He wonders how much time it will take nature to really work its fingers into this place, reclaim it as its own, and peel all that human holiness away like the skin of a ripe fruit. 

At the second-landing, the once-fresh whitewash has already begun to peel and go grey. But the locks never stick here; the hinges never squeak. Even swollen by humidity, the chapel’s wooden doors are always respectfully silent in their frames.

As Louis slips through them, the soft sound of a soprano weaves through the vast emptiness of the space and becomes an aria: the _Ave Maria_ , a recent recording. The music seems to emanate from the walls, yet fall short of the vaulted ceiling. In reality it rises from a radio-sized CD and tape player which David had successfully programmed many months ago to play all night. Louis shuts the doors behind him and inhales deeply of the soapy church-scent: burnt wax, old incense, lavender and sage. The individualized notes of the singer’s voice echo quietly off the rounded knave. The chapel is shrouded in a thick shadow which muffles all sound without, making the world outside seem alien, far-away.

It is peaceful here. Louis never turns on the harsh electrics. When the moon is full, its light is enough; but the sky has darkened to a deeper night since he set out, and when he ties back the dusty deep-purple drapes and uncovers the dirty stained-glass, the chapel remains in a shadow so dark it is untouchable by the light of the stars. No moonlight, no moon. The sky is empty of grace, tonight.

Louis will have to make some himself. He skirts the pews, dried rosepetals crunching under his shoes, and stops before the first Station of the Cross, collecting dust in its indented wall-shelf. He fumbles in the torn lining of his absolutely unseasonable wool jacket and finally finds a lightbringer: the silver cigarette lighter which had been a housewarming gift from David upon his move to the Rue Royale five months ago. It is a fine British antique, relic from his first lifetime, weighted silver hand-etched with the curve of a flowering vine. 

It takes a few flicks. The fuel is running low and Louis has little interest in refilling it. He lights the red candles which are tucked in the hollow of the shelf, then moves slowly in a circuit around the chapel until all the Stations emit a low, flickering warmth. The light itself is more consequential than the ritual: the flames mean more than any imagined vision of Christ. Circling back to the chapel door, Louis brushes with light fingers the life-sized hands of the plaster Saints which stand watch on either side of the entrance- little Therese and lovely Lucy, offering up her eyeballs on a plate. He lights the stubs of wax in the crannies of their feet and then turns to walk with an even step down the aisle. 

Dim flickers of light cast weird shadows across the left-behinds of former visitors in the dark pews beside him. Long-dead roses rot in the heat; bushels of baby’s breath turn to dust; some stranger’s abandoned copy of _Memnoch the Devil_ glints, shiny paperback, in the dark. Louis steps with echoing shoes to the Communion rail and is greeted by the grandly colorful Reina Maria who grieves over the knave with her impassive, mournful gaze. He pauses before the larger-than-life Virgin, and stares coldly up into her painted eyes. Then he chooses a red taper from the bank of half-melted wax at her feet, lights it, and passes it methodically over the dozens of hungry wicks until they burn as warm and bright as any hearth. 

The chapel, lit up, is beautiful and strange; the ceiling seems darker in contrast to the uneven glow. The looming stained-glass pictures above look lurid, their images distorted, the pews are full of shifting indigo shadows. The stairs to the chancel are covered in flowers, heads of bluebells crushing softly under Louis’ shoes as he ascends. At the platform, he is greeted by a grim apparition: the giant-scale wooden Christ on his Cross which looms from its mounted place above the knave. It is a ghoulish piece, he has always thought: the wretched torso twisting with agony, carved gore of the stigmata painted shiny red; eyes rolled back, seeing nothing. Whatever Medieval artist had carved it must have had a vivid imagination. Around the extended arms hangs a long, ropelike rosevine left here by some long-ago blood-drinker in dramatic mourning, mouldering flowers pungent in the humidity. 

There is the scene here of a wake after all the mourners have left. Abandoned offerings carpet the platform: so many dry lilies and orchids one cannot see the pine boards beneath. An old rosary crunches under Louis’ feet as he steps towards the epicenter, where a barrier of candles abruptly forms an empty circle in the mess: _go no further_. Almost everyone obeys. But Louis doesn’t have to. The bare boards within are strewn with only a few stray petals, a stack of books; the stick of light by which Louis reads; the little tape player performing its mournful duty, and, of course, the body. 

Louis steps carefully inside the boundary as if breaking a circle of salt. He brings his body over the threshold, and, as he has every night for five years, folds his knees beneath himself in the attitude of prayer to take his place at Lestat’s side. 

******II.** He is as he was the night before, and the night before that: as he always is. Curled in-self defeat with his spine like a crescent, right hand closed in a loose fist with his golden hair like a spill of light around him. Louis reaches into his jacket again and closes his hand on the hard plastic case of a tape. He leans over and pops open the player, momentarily silencing the _Ave_ to replace it with something new. The sound rises slowly- softly, Louis turning the dial to a tolerable volume- into the first act of _Madame Butterfly_. Though Lestat shows no response anymore, even to music, Louis does try to vary the material. Dust has collected on the purple silk of his shirt, dulling its luster. His velvet merlot jacket- cast aside months ago- is ruined; silk crushed beneath his head where Louis had slipped it for a makeshift pillow. The posture of his body and long sprawled legs is loose, inarticulate yet somehow self-defensive, and his face is that peaceful slack of death from which it is impossible to discern any living expression he had once worn. 

Of course, Lestat moves _sometimes_. Louis has given him blankets just to watch him kick them off. But like the convent itself he resists comforts- resists care. In previous years Lestat had made frequent and startling visits to the Rue Royale, making it easier to attend to him: to change his clothes, to brush his hair as he sat in bed staring dead through the wallpaper. But he never comes to the apartment anymore. As white and still as plaster St. Therese with her hand extended, forever offering the lily of her little faith, Lestat no longer rises at all; he barely even turns in his sleep.

Louis kneels at his side as the first aria of _Madame_ whispers its soft, mournful melody against the oppressive silence of the chapel, and watches the almost-imperceptible movements of Lestat’s eyes behind his bloodless lids. He waits for the movement of his chest. Lestat takes a breath roughly once every ninety-four seconds: though once he’d stopped for an entire night and Louis, filled with inchoate dread, had rushed immediately back to the apartment only to be unable to communicate his horror in the face of David’s reason: _He doesn’t_ **_need_ ** _to, Louis, it means nothing at all._

Now he sits for whole minutes, silent and attentive, studying Lestat’s face in the warm candlelight and taking some kind of solace in the slow rise-and-fall of the breast beneath his unbuttoned lilac shirt. 

Louis never says hello. Formalities make him feel as if he is talking to himself. Instead he reaches for their current read- a collection of Rilke in French and German- and thumbs to the photograph that marks their place. It should be a terrible picture, taken with a disposable camera on a dark beach and developed cheaply by David at a pharmacy in Rio; but Lestat never looks bad in photographs, even mid-laugh, even when the flash makes it clear by his luster that he is far more monster than man. 

David’s handwriting on the back says _1993_ . They’d been together for such a short time, the three of them, in-between all the evils. Lestat is beautiful in the low candlelight of the chapel, golden glow lending false warmth to his cool cheek; _peace_ to the expressionless face. It is the face of a saint, going into the good night with serene acceptance. Somehow he never looks how Louis remembers. 

Louis picks the picture from the spine, opens the page to _David Singt vor Saul;_ lets his lips follow the words and, seated with Lestat’s inert body in the center of their heathen circle, begins again their nightly ritual. 

Though he has visited every evening for five years, circumstances have changed. In the beginning Louis would often find himself startled from reading by a gentle touch to his knee; he would look up to see Lestat’s eyes open, uneven pupils fixed on his face with a soft stare of wonder. And though Lestat had hardly sounded like himself at all- voice rasping with disuse- there had even been a time when they had gone over books together: once, Louis had brought him a few of the medieval mystic volumes he obsessed over and spent a very happy evening listening to him animatedly explain the philosophies of flesh contained within.

But last February there had come a dreary night when Lestat had stormed into the Rue Royale at two AM as if he had a purpose. Pausing in the back parlor with roaming eyes and furrowed brow, he had been silent; then he’d tensely asked _Where am I?_ and Louis had cautiously told him. Lestat had turned around and seen Louis, there, reading in the rose-colored chair: there had been recognition. Then he’d strode wordlessly across the room and out the window, into the courtyard, gone as quickly as he’d come. 

This had been the last time Louis had heard him speak. Though he had ‘visited’ through spring, Lestat had been less present than ever- mute, confused and beautiful, as disoriented as if he really had been cast down to Earth from Heaven. And as the moon had crept towards her shortest night, he had stopped rising, grown still; the solstice had come and gone. Now, autumn draws near and Lestat shows no more preference or objection, no will at all.

And so there is this: their nights together. Secretly, Louis is glad the mourning party has left, that all their friends are gone with their dramas and grief; glad that it is only he and David now like the sentinel set on the front-step. When the chapel was crowded with blood-drinkers and their ‘respects’ Louis had spent whole nights wringing his hands, exhausting himself checking and re-checking every dusty corner of St. Elizabeth’s for danger ( _for what kind of danger?_ David used to ask.) Though Lestat is farther than ever from reality, his current state is strangely more comfortable for Louis- he’s safer, more controllable. And in his wakelessness there is an uneasy peace: for the first time in their shared lives, Lestat is incapable of _scaring_ Louis. He isn’t even a threat to himself. 

These nights Louis is more at ease here than in the Rue Royale. Though David’s recent cohabitation _has_ been a great improvement- bringing with it many, many benefits and pleasures- he enjoys his solitude here: nothing but Lestat’s silent body and attic birdsong for company. Being alone in the apartment makes Louis uneasy; his previous solitude _there_ had been maddening. With no-one else to play house, the Rue Royale is more like a museum of themselves, or memento mori. 

Thankfully David has taken to staying in more often. Louis is generally a homebody- and now even a single evening alone in the apartment can play unpleasant tricks on his mind. Only last week he had spent hours convinced that some kind of animal was trapped in the attic, no matter how many times David dutifully went up to check. 

_I believe,_ says David in private. David says many things, in their private moments together, that he does not express to the rest of the ‘Coven’ in his missive reports about the status in New Orleans. _I believe that Lestat’s soul is wandering. That he is not present in his body._ Though a skilled metaphysician in life, the Talamasca’s former Superior is left now to guess as much as anyone. There is little precedent from which to base theories (and that which exists is worrying. No one wants to consider the stone elephant in the room). But all this talk of souls, secular and spiritual, truthfully makes Louis uneasy. He does not want to imagine Lestat’s consciousness trapped inside his inert body: but the idea of him lost in some void and wandering seems far worse to consider. Every supposition is only as likely as theory, and every theory only as likely as faith. Maybe everything really _is_ fine in Heaven. Louis will never get to know. 

And anything would be better than this disquiet, this inability-to-know. Louis would prefer the sure knowledge that Lestat will lay here a thousand years to wondering, every night: will this be the night? It would be better to know that the Devil really had taken him than to be left with this simple banal tragedy. It is impossible for Louis to reconcile the man he has loved with this quiet, still form. Impossible to look at this unmoving figure and say: this is Lestat, who spat fire, who danced for that one night in 1985 with pagan abandon; who ran around mad and worried Louis to death; who fucked nuns and televangelists and slaughtered virgins and then wept about it, who was all contradiction, no simplicity, who blazed in Louis’ long night brighter than the sun. All they have are simple facts. And grief, truly, is the inability to understand one simple fact: that this empty body _is him_. That this _is him_ , all of transformation and mystery; all the magic and misery of Louis’ life lying as still as if he had never moved at all. It is inconceivable, such _nothing_ where there had been such _something._ Somehow it is the selfsame ache as all those years ago when Claudia had led the way, lantern in hand through the swamp this place had once been; and he the guilty one had contended with the weight of the whitesheet burden which had been the love of his life so far. 

There is a hole in Louis’ chest that cannot be bridged by understanding. He cannot stop waiting by the phone. Sometimes, falling into a pleasant spell of forgetfulness reading in the back parlor, he swears he hears Lestat’s familiar step out on the winding iron stairs. 

David says, _Louis, he wouldn’t want this for you._ But David doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

Louis’ inability to have _faith_ in any presupposition about Lestat’s condition- as David does- leaves him only with hope: and _hope_ is merely faith for fools. All he can do is be glad that Lestat no longer has the consciousness to hurt himself more than he already has. Though Louis understands that powerful spirits are capable of elaborate deceptions, the sight of Lestat’s empty socket- and then the damaged, uncanny eye- had been haunting, a Medusa horror of implication around the bend of Louis’ brain which could only be bourne through a mirror. _Clawed out of my head_ , Lestat had said, hands shaking, all terror and belief. _Clawed out of his head,_ Louis was left to wonder, _by whom._

And for his part, Louis tries not to look at what is too frightening to see: to not think what is too frightening to think: pays no attention to the lights which glow, luminescent as fireflies, in the corners of his eyes. He has never met a spirit, never beheld a Devil, never heard the ghost that Jesse Reeves reported in the Rue Royale. But he _has_ heard something in the attic that is not any animal. David has checked and checked, and found nothing; and Louis has pretended reassurance even as he hears, still, that familiar pace on the creaking boards above.

As he always pretends congenial agreement to David. As he had pretended last week, when David said in those very nervous, very British tones of implication: _Louis, I would like us to continue being friends._

(Because of course Louis would want them to be friends. It has been a great comfort to have David in the apartment with him, a great comfort to be _friends_ ; a great comfort that, when Louis’ own bed grows too cold for reading, there is another set of sheets he can slip into which are kept warm by the presence of another man.)

 _Louis, I would like us to continue being friends,_ he’d said, and Louis had smiled softly, been agreeable; told David that he, the more mortally _mature_ party (if not the older), surely understood what was best. _Well, of course I want to do what is best for you,_ he had winced, _and best for Lestat. No matter how agreeable your company is to me, I suspect that perhaps our current arrangement might not be in your best interest. Louis, I am not sure this is…_

He’d paused, sought the words. And then: _Louis,_ David had said, with the firmness of a guilty man. _Perhaps it would be good for you to get away from New Orleans for a little while._

Louis had taken his hand, been tender, agreeable; and then he had gone out to hunt and left David sitting on his own words for almost a week. It had been effective. When he’d returned, three nights ago, to the apartment, David had been so relieved and glad to see him that it seemed he’d do anything for Louis, anything he wanted at all.

Too keenly aware of Louis’ weaknesses for his own good and knowing he cannot read minds, David underestimates the ease with which Louis can read _him_. The suggestion that he hasn’t the courage to voice lies heavy and obvious over the flat; and Louis, with his own sly suggestions, has already denied it. He _will not_ go North. To be with Armand while Lestat lies here, unable to care for himself, is unthinkable. It would be too much like choosing to make the same mistakes over again. 

David would have Louis believe that he leaves his thoughts alone out of decency. But Louis knows better: neither of them are decent. He has seen, in brief glimpses, beneath the mirrored surface of Louis’ heart; beyond the sheet of ice and into the depth of the lake; and he is afraid to wade out lest they both go under. Louis can feel David pulling at the ties that have bound them, steering their little lifeboat to shore and saying _let us stand on solid ground_. _Let us both walk free._

But David does not understand. Louis does not want to feel the stable earth beneath his feet; he wants to sail out, indefinitely, over the dark waters, into the long unceasing night. And he knows that David will not let him sail alone. Being a caretaker himself, he knows that David will eagerly pay for Louis’ life with his own freedom; he will always choose Louis, as Louis has chosen Lestat, and as long ago he had chosen to sacrifice himself caring for Claudia. 

A dependent is a potent pot of honey and Louis wonders how long it will take David to drown. 

He’s been reading Rilke for about an hour, the low echo of his sonorous voice interweaving with the intermezzos of _Butterfly_ , when it happens. A very simple thing- a very normal thing- but most unusual for a vampire: Louis turns page to the twenty-third stanza of _Les Roses_ and pricks his finger on the sharp edge of the page.

 **III.** Louis blinks, and the reverie of reading is broken. He raises his thin hand from the paper, turns it palm-up, and stares in disbelief at the tip of his left-ring finger. A drop of blood begins to rise.

The smell of himself hangs in the air like fresher incense. It isn’t common to cut the hardened skin of a vampire; but Louis knows that he is an uncommonly pliable vampire. He watches as the droplet descends, slowly, each segment of his ring finger, leaving a trail of red. He watches, brow furrowed, as it drips and lands- dark as an inkblot- upon the page. Perhaps it is the dimness lending the red its shadow which gives him pause. Or perhaps it is how the uneven, flickering candlelight seems to imbue his blood with a false living warmth. Perhaps it is simply the grand emptiness of the chapel which weights this moment with symbol, the way the tinny recording of the music falls short of the space; maybe it is the way that the eyes of Saint Lucy seem to stare from their plate. 

Or perhaps it is the stillness of Lestat, who would never leave a nick unattended. Louis’ eyes drift to his face. He finds himself, as he often does, studying its details: how pale Lestat is, how waxen in the low light, like a marble statue whose veins of stone flow with the softness of flesh. How defined the gaunt outline of his hard jaw. How tender the slackness of his deathpale lips. It is a starved, sublime beauty, a tranquility that is absolutely terrible. Louis looks with a strange intentness at those lips, thinking: that is the mouth which has refused hunger. Lestat said he would never kill again. 

But for Louis he has always been the _embodiment_ of hunger and those lips without it seem alien, beautiful but strange- not _his_ lips. Louis looks at the tiny veins in his near-translucent eyelids; at Lestat’s long, golden lashes, which have collected a layer of dust. He thinks of what happens to vampires who starve and sleep. 

He has spent hours- whole nights- like this: just sitting and staring, studying every detail of Lestat’s face and trying to discern any expression at all. Though he is capable of an unconscious animal violence against those who disturb him (watching Armand at his throat had been agonizing for many reasons), Lestat has never touched Louis- never lashed out at him at all. There have been no other exceptions. Even David had once been grabbed around the ankle with such force as to give him a night’s injury. Only Louis has total freedom. Though he has spent night after night at Lestat’s side, Lestat has never laid a finger on him; rare is it that he even reacts to Louis’ presence at all. 

David suggests, _he knows who you are, Louis, he loves you. He does not want to hurt you._ But David _cannot_ understand. The last time Lestat had physically injured Louis had been an accident: in 1989 on the Night Island, his wrist grabbed too-hard in enthusiasm; Louis had come away with a finger-shaped bruise. Lestat had been frightened of himself then, his body a house newly-haunted by what Akasha had done to it. He had acted strange, scared- been defensive, then distant; and for their remaining time together on the Island, he had barely touched Louis at all. 

Now increasingly Louis finds in himself a strange desire: he wishes that Lestat _would_ strike him for drawing too close. At least it would be a sign. A sign of what? Of _something_. 

Louis pulls himself a few inches closer to that still body, until the ash-scuffed knee of his black jeans almost touches that empty torso. He studies how truly transparent Lestat’s skin is: how there is no remaining trace of that flush which is the only thing that makes a vampire look _alive_. He has not had a drop to drink in over five years. His thick golden hair is spread out on the pine boards around him, dust dimming its luster like the curls of a neglected doll. But it is clean, not terribly tangled at all. Now, Louis reaches out and curls his fingers into Lestat’s soft locks. He takes a secret, sensual pleasure in running his right hand through those heavy curls, savoring the familiar weight of such thick hair. His knuckles brush the lamblike down at the nape of Lestat’s neck as he combs out what snarls have formed since his last attention; and the impression occurs from sense-memory of how all those years ago on that fatal night he had drawn his fingers through the child’s golden locks until they glowed gold as a halo on the pillows around her.

Louis realizes he has raised his left hand to his lips and is sucking absently at his papercut, worrying it with a fang; not letting it close. Autophagy is a nasty habit he never quite kicked from those long-ago days of surviving on animal blood- when he would rend his own skin just to taste _some_ kind of thinking creature, bite his fingertips and cuticles and chew his lips to a bloody mess and stop, of course, before it ever became any kind of pleasurable. 

David says that Lestat’s lack of reaction to Louis’ attentions- though he does not understand how _attentive_ those attentions really are- is a good sign. _He does not react because he is aware of you, Louis; he knows he is safe with you._ But David does not know what he is talking about. How could he, in his limited experience, possibly understand that _safety_ is a foregone conclusion between them, forbidden by the spark of their chemistry? Every touch is some threat of something. Some possible romance or violence; intimacies tangled so thoroughly together that the knot cannot be untied. 

And Louis _wants_ what makes him not-safe: he _is not safe_ from what he wants. The only way to be _safe_ is to swallow his desires whole. There have been times when Louis had suppressed his appetites for so long that he did not exist at all. He wonders if Lestat hungers in his sleep. He wonders if Lestat, finally, feels safe from what _he_ wants. 

Louis reaches out, through the darkness that separates them, and lays the back of his right hand across Lestat’s cold hard cheek. 

Cold as stone. Louis stares at the slack mouth of his lover and thinks of the aftertaste left on the tip of his tongue from his own finger, his own blood. 

He thinks he should go back to reading. He glances at the book in his lap, and sees the drop of himself on the page. Louis’ left hand rises in the air, as if it were a phantom, not attached to him; as if it were bewitched. He stares at the curve of Lestat’s lips, slightly parted, petal-shaped and pale as a dead man’s in the empty night. 

The part of him that _wants_ to believe David hisses a fierce chastisement in the back of his mind which takes the tenor of the genteel scold when he catches Louis not hunting. It is saying: _Louis, you are not so foolish_. But Louis turns away from that voice. He looks, instead, into his dark and secret heart, and hears a softspoken murmur that sounds more like his own. 

It is saying _Louis,_ _you are a fool._

That whisper echoes through the halls of his body and every empty vein until it is like a presence which pushes on Louis’ skin from the inside. 

He does not think about what he is doing. 

He listens, instead, to the music. Listens to Butterfly sing of her love for God; for the man who will leave her. He reaches out through the dark, and runs his bloody fingertip across Lestat’s lower lip. 

Louis’ blood shines across Lestat’s mouth like a telltale smear of lipstick, near-black in the dark. Gently, he pushes and feels the soft-firmness of Lestat’s smooth lips give under his touch. He watches the first joint of his index finger disappear. 

That mouth does not tighten or slacken. Louis’ finger slides past his lips until his first knuckle brushes Lestat’s Cupid’s bow. His skin is cool, his mouth inside is cold- damp but not quite _wet_ , uncanny, but not unpleasant. Louis’ fingertip presses into the soft pad of his tongue. He feels the hard teeth and traces the back of Lestat’s smooth, sharp fangs. There is no reaction; no pressure, no hunger, no response whatsoever, and for a moment Louis is overcome by a violent urge to wrench Lestat’s jaw open and shove his fingers down his throat- to make him feel anything at all. But instead he runs the tender pad over the ivory insides of his lover’s teeth and follows the curve of an exaggerated canine to its point. 

Carefully- very carefully- Louis presses the bloody print of his ring-finger into the fang that bore him. 

The voice in Louis’ brain which takes the tenor of David’s tells him: _this is desperation, this is foolish, this is_ **_nothing_** _. What are you doing?_ He pushes his fingertip against Lestat’s fang until the tiny sting reminds him of the pain which precedes swoon. _Are you mad?_ It is needle without thimble, thorn of a rose pressed into the soft pad of a finger; like the prick of the spindle which sent Sleeping Beauty to her rest. Louis closes his eyes, and his breath comes haltingly, a little heavily, as blood wells beneath the pressure of Lestat’s fang, beginning to drip red into that supplicant mouth. Louis does not _feel_ mad: but he _does not know what he is doing_. He tenses his jaw as he punctures deeper, then hisses as he yanks his fingertip in a quick motion to slit the soft skin further. Resting that finger on Lestat’s lower lip, Louis feels himself dripping; he opens his eyes. He is staring, brow furrowed, into Lestat’s beautiful face, at Lestat’s beautiful mouth, stained with his blood, and he does not know what he is waiting for. 

But now that he has moved into the territory of transgression the further urge is irresistible. Having broken the taboo of touch, Louis is consumed with the desire to run his hands over Lestat’s cool skin- to feel the hard body beneath his clothes. After all this time with David’s respectful reticences he is so hungry to touch and be touched that it is like he does not have enough hands for all the kind of touch he wants. Louis shifts Lestat’s dead-weight easily, torso into his lap, shoulders and head cradled in his arms; then he slides his right hand into the opened collar of Lestat’s silk shirt and rests his palm on the breast beneath, wanting to feel the rise-and-fall of his chest. The skin stretched across his sternum is so translucent and thin it seems almost blue. But beneath the pressure of Louis’ palm, that dead heart slowly beats.

Lestat is inanimate, but still beautiful- like the Beauty whom, in the grimmer tale that Louis was told by the only nurse he ever had in France, lay asleep for years until her nursing child sucked the thorn from her finger. Louis puts pressure to his tongue and lower lip and watches Lestat’s jaw fall a little more open. He is so malleable and passive that the only comforting sign is the slow beat in his chest. Though Louis is biased; for him, there has always laid a sense of calm in the rhythm of Lestat’s heart.

Lestat is not _here_ , now, he cannot know; and so Louis bends slowly, wrapping that body in his arms until he is pressed flush ear-to-sternum. His eyes close as he feels the ribcage expand; Lestat languor his way through a deep, even breath. And for a moment unseen Louis lets himself rest that way: head-to-chest, silently attending to the wet thumping brag of his heart. 

When he pulls himself away it is slow as an agony. Louis straightens, and then opens his eyes. He looks at Lestat’s face, head limp on his neck; he looks at that bloody mouth. He wants to feel that fang again, that pain which is good, sensual, which grounds him more comfortably in his body than he has been in a long time. Louis reopens the wound with a quick movement against Lestat’s canine. It is a very shallow little cut and it keeps healing. The blood wells eagerly as he presses the pierced pad directly into the soft meat of Lestat’s tongue. Nothing. Louis wonders if it is his own weakness or if Lestat would at this point truly prefer death over sating himself. Louis wonders how _he_ factors into the taboo of ‘thou shalt not kill’; he thinks that surely if Lestat knew _whose_ blood this was, he would take it. Lestat firmly said he would not drink blood again (that he could not stand it, actually. He said he could not stand it). But Louis thinks that to drink _his_ blood would not be the same. Maybe Lestat so truly wants to disappear that he will not even drink unconsciously. Or perhaps, Louis considers, it is simply not enough blood. 

Louis looks at the white expanse of his own wrist, blue veins raised beneath transparent flesh, and feels his blood straining against the skin; longing to flow and be free. 

But this is madness: to delusionally hope that, after all this time, all Louis would have to do is give Lestat what he _refuses_ to want. When he pulls his hand away there is a snag of lip on his fingertip and for a moment Louis almost mistakes it for that long-awaited hunger. But the desire doesn’t come. It is like putting a baby-bottle to the molded mouth of a doll. The streak of blood lingers, unlicked, on Lestat’s lips.

Louis leans in and peers closely into Lestat’s closed eyes, as if he could discern the uneven pupils behind the lids. He smells like nothing; just dead flowers, incense-ash in his hair. His body is so still that if it were not for his pliable limbs and the steady cycle of his weakened pulse, it would seem as if Louis were cradling some sad wax saint left broken and abandoned at the altar. His lifeless muscles give no resistance as Louis adjusts him in his arms, supporting his head upon the limp neck, blonde hair spilling like spun gold. Louis has never played Prince- he doesn’t know how. But now, trembling, he bends at the curve of his waist and with a firmness that surprises himself presses his hungry mouth to Lestat’s cold lips. 

Chastely, Louis kisses himself from those lips. Beneath his shaking breath and barely-suppressed desire, they are as cool and still as those of a marble statue. Deep and dormant, he feels Lestat’s pulse. But that mouth does not press back. 

Louis rises and shudderingly sighs, does not open his eyes, tries not to think; letting Lestat’s head rest in his lap, he finds with his hands the collection of Rilke. With shaking fingers he opens it, and only when the book is raised to his face does he open his eyes and begin to read again until his voice has lost its tremble. 

He weaves his way in German through the verses of _Les Roses_. He thinks not of the ache in his blood, the pulse points of Lestat’s throat, the curve of his mouth when he used to smile. He loses himself in abstractions, form and craft, the literature of someone else’s love and does not think of his own. But Louis is too conscious of his own body, now- folding and refolding his legs- shifting nervously- skin sticky from the humidity, flower-smell overwhelming; aware of his own hunger, aware of the hollow lightness. He reads with one hand, makes his palm bleed with the nails of the other. Only when Louis has finished the long poem does he allow himself to glance again. 

And only then does he notice, illuminated by candlelight, a kiss of warmth- a faint blush- has risen barely, just barely, to Lestat’s cheek. 

Louis blinks. It is a subtle change which could be a trick of the shifting light. He looks up at the flickering candles, the shadowy pews; looks up at the curved arches of the imitation-Gothic windows which loom above them. Little illumination passes through the dirty stained-glass. There are no artificial lamps from the distant world without, no moon tonight.

He turns again slowly to look at the prone form of Lestat, who has not moved in months, and peers into his face. There is no illumination unaccounted for. Louis stares at the motionless form in his lap and blinks, again, slowly. The illusion does not disappear. It is not a trick. 

There, behind the unlit lamp of Lestat’s face, glows the faintest hint of life within. And as Louis’ eyes move in rapid disbelief over the planes of his body in search of some saner explanation, he sees a thing even more remarkable than light: between the sprawling spread of Lestat’s legs, there is a shadow.

 ******IV.** All the words of all the poems in all the hundreds of volumes that Louis has brought here, over five years, seem to hang unfinished in the air.

When Lestat had last risen (Louis does not want to think _in March_ ), Louis had dressed him himself. He had chosen these clothes, old favorites, from Lestat’s closets, removed the old ones with caregiver patience; he had pulled sleeve to shoulder, button to hole, tucked in these shirt-tails and tied these shoes as if he were dressing a child. The change is obvious to someone who has monitored Lestat so attentively. Louis would notice anything unusual; and this is more than unusual. Nothing like this has ever happened at all. 

Lestat, of course, does not stir. Louis studies him very hard, dragging his green eyes over every inch- searching for any other sign of movement or change- anything. But he remains still, sprawled where the Altar would be with no sign of life beyond the faint beat of his heart, the blush upon his cheek, and that slight, slight tent in the fabric of his jeans. No change. Nothing else. Louis does not know how this is possible at all. He supposes it happens to mortals in their sleep, sometimes. But they are not mortals.

And he _wishes_ he could believe that Lestat is simply sleeping. The hot, stale air of the chapel is oppressive; shadows swim in the humidity. The pre-storm atmosphere feels charged with some static that, in the vast darkness, feels almost like magic. For an unbeliever an unguarded altar is a paradox of temptation. The lack of belief frees one from any real guilt; but the very transgression of profanity implies, in the nature of taboo, a kind of guilty belief. 

Louis puts the book down. 

He realizes a long pause has occurred in the CD recording of _Butterfly_ only as the trembling soprano’s voice rises softly again into the dark, shifting from silent intermission into the first aria of act two.

Tentatively Louis reaches out and lays his knuckles, again, across Lestat’s cold cheek. _Less cold_ , he thinks, _than before_. He brushes down the hard line of that jaw, over the specter of mortal peach fuzz. Louis had shaved his own face before he was turned; Lestat, for all his physical strength, had been barely more than a boy. 

“Lestat?” In the enormous darkness Louis’ voice is nothing at all. 

And of course no sudden miracle occurs. Of course not. Louis furrows his brow. There is something in the back of his brain that is wriggling, pacing, a presence in the attic whispering words he cannot hear; telling him something he does not want to know. “Lestat?” Again. No change. Why would there be? Why would he suddenly turn, now, to offer Louis some expression of love-cum-gratitude-cum-apology? Louis bites his lip, worrying it for a moment, and decides to press his luck: he puts a hand on Lestat’s shoulder and applies just enough pressure to push him onto his back. Lestat’s prone body rolls with the eerie, inanimate ease of a fresh corpse, before all the blood congeals at the bottom and the rigor really starts to set in. 

Suddenly Louis glances up and sees the terrible face of Christ floating massive in the dark. There is no one here but the statues, those plaster saints peering with strange, watchful eyes; the bright Reina Maria who hovers mournfully above her candles, a technicolor poltergeist in the flickering dark. For a moment he looks at her and almost feels the ghost of some kind of presence. Then Louis thinks, the statues are nobody; these relics are nothing; there is no holiness, no hope, no magic or miracles in St. Elizabeth’s tonight and no higher power than them. God just isn’t watching. 

God isn’t _here_. The Virgin stares impassively, her plaster face painted in grief, as Louis’ eyes slowly lower beneath his long lashes. When he opens them again he is staring at Lestat’s face, smooth and beautiful and inanimate as a doll in the candlelight. _Hail Mary, full of sorrow._

It seems as if a darker darkness has fallen over the chapel. There is no light but the play of flame across Lestat’s cheek. He looks warm, soft, touchable; and Louis wants to touch and _be_ touched, to be wanted for a change instead of just this eternal wanting. He reaches for Lestat’s cold hand and takes it in his own, squeezes so hard he hears a knuckle pop; slides his grip down, presses his fingers to the slow pulse in Lestat’s wrist. The hand lolls limp and heavy, a flower drooping on a stem, a dead man’s hand. Slowly, Louis raises that hand to the level of his face. Slowly he presses his cheek into Lestat’s cold palm. 

Louis cradles his jaw with Lestat’s right hand and closes his eyes. He brushes those chilly fingertips down, over his lips; lifts his chin, trails the unfeeling touch down over the quickening pulse in his throat. Imagines that palm pressing down. But of course there is no pressure, no tender bruise. Briefly he envisions taking both those hands in his own- running them over himself, re-teaching them _feeling_. 

Of course there is _some_ possibility that somewhere, dimly Lestat _can_ feel. _Can_ _know_ , as David says, _who Louis is_. Perhaps these physical sensations might call out through some void. It is this hopeful terror that Louis focuses on when he slips Lestat’s cold fingers, middle and ring, into his mouth. 

He opens his eyes and sees his lover’s face gilded at the edges by golden light; and because it falls upon his face, that fitful flame seems the brightest light Louis has seen in a long time. He watches Lestat carefully. He would stop, he thinks, if he saw any hint of wakefulness within. He would surely stop. He hollows his cheeks around those fingers and then thinks, well, perhaps Lestat would not _want_ him to stop. If David is correct- if he is _aware_ of Louis- then surely, this is an allowance. 

Louis looks into Lestat’s face and sees nothing. Those fingers do not curl in his mouth. When he slides his lips off, the digits shine wet in the dark.

Louis presses them to his face. He presses his lips to the center of that clammy palm. He inhales the smell of Lestat’s skin, of the blood beneath. Against his cheek he feels the ghost of texture beneath smooth vampire skin, the suggestion of where mortal calluses used to be. 

His grief, with no illumination or insight, is deeper than grief. Grief has symbols and language, and Louis has no language: he has lived five long years under an eclipse of all meaning. Just a candle burning at both ends getting dimmer and dimmer, just Echo without Narcissus, an empty mirror. It seems there is a tear in the sky where the sun was, and there cannot even be moonlight; there is a tear in the beauty of the night sky and beyond it lie no Heavenly bodies, no vast universe. There is a wound in the world and beyond it is nothing. 

There is a wound in Louis’ chest and inside it is _nothing,_ just a pit of endless unfulfillment, just the emptiness that lies past the pale of despair. There is not even the illumination of agony. He is just all ache, hunger in the shape of a man, a darkness reflecting nothing. He does not even know why he still tries.

Louis lets that limp hand slide to the floor and hit the pine boards with a quiet _thump_. He lets go of hope, and steps into the dark. A shadow slips over the moon of his heart. 

He reaches out and rests his hand on the inside of Lestat’s thigh. 

The denim is rough under his palm, lean muscle hard beneath. There are so many thoughts which Louis does not think; thoughts which might amount to incantation. To think them would make their implications real. Sometimes it is better that the dead do not wake, Louis considers, as his fingers find the seam of those jeans. Better to bury them entirely than pray for necromancy. Having spent his whole immortal life preserving his dead- adorning their deaths, bejeweling their bodies post-mortem- he wishes only that it were possible to bury this pain. But it is impossible when Louis comes here every night and looks Lestat in the face, this body he cannot bury because he still lives, still breathes; his heart still beats. It would be murder to stop grieving. Murder, to bury his warm body alone. Louis is like the adored devotee of some long-ago Pharaoh, whose will entombed his beloveds alive with him: his heart finally nothing but another possession of Lestat’s which must be given in offering. Five years, standing in this grave. Five years shoveling in the dirt. Louis thinks he is nearing completion: and by the time he is done he will have buried them both alive.

Finally his hand draws up, up, up, with a tenderness as terrible as eating what you worship, and the loveline of Louis’ right palm comes to rest against the outlined shaft.

 **V.** And when he squeezes Lestat through his jeans there is an unexpected rhythm of memory in his hand which is like hearing a hymn from childhood and realizing he never really forgot the words. From guilt-muddled memories of 1969 Louis recognizes the furtive movements with which his fingers unzip the fly, wriggle the jeans just-low-enough. He isn’t wearing any underwear (Louis did not give him any underwear), and the skin in the shadow of his iliac crest is cold and thin, almost blue. Louis’ left hand slides slowly under the silk of his shirt and up the hard expanse of his stomach, tender as communion. 

What is he _doing?_ Abruptly filled with an acute sense of being watched, he looks up; but there is no one. His gaze flickers across the shadowed pews. The eyes of the icons on the walls creep across his skin, uneven light lending their gazes a strange, stern sentience. 

But no one ever comes here anymore: even David stays away. It is just him and all these hallowed things. Meeting the stare of a gold-painted Christ, Louis’ stomach twists with some phantom nausea- a deeply-encoded repulsion leftover by that long-ago mortal who believed in belief. 

But then Louis looks down again, and his eyes fall upon the miracle of his lover’s face. Limp in Louis’ arms _is_ the holiest thing he knows: gold and flushed beneath the skin, almost vital, heartbreakingly handsome; sublime as the Devil himself and so serene it seems that he might as well be dead. An immaculate beauty, purified of the sin of the self. No more evil, no more _want_ , no more Lestat. Just this body inviolate, unpolluted by _the blood, which,_ saith Dracula, _is the life_ ; hollow as any other holy thing. The only trace of him left is the poison which beats, still, through Louis’ heart.

Louis raises his hand to his mouth, cradling Lestat’s shoulders in repulsive Pieta, and slides his spitslick fingers into the opening of his jeans. 

He keeps his eyes on the unworldly beauty of that sleeping face. He does not look at what he is doing. Lestat’s skin is cool; with no borrowed metabolic heat left in his veins, Louis’ palm feels hot against him. He is not _hard_ , exactly. But not _soft_ either- just stiff enough to hold, smooth and cool as a stone with a velveteen skin. 

Louis stares into his empty expression, watching for any sign- any twitch- and tries to ignore the movements of his hand. To tell himself that it is the _reaction_ he wants; that he is not actually _interested_ in what he is doing. But as he twists a few uncertain strokes Louis is burningly aware of the flush that creeps unbidden up his own neck. Overwarm in humid proximity to Lestat, he is uncomfortably conscious of his _own_ body- of that aching emptiness _hunger_ pulling at him with a futile temptation. Louis has not hunted for three nights, and denial of _want_ has a way of making _need_ into a far greater monster. 

When he looks at Lestat’s lips, the faint smell of the blood beneath prickles Louis’ skin from the inside. He exhales, rolling the shaft in his palm, and wonders _how_ exactly Lestat has the capacity for _this_ when he has not had a drop to drink for over five years. But the body in his arms lies unresponsive. Louis frowns, shifts the weight, squeezes _hard_ ; Lestat’s languid breath does not hitch. There is not a twitch of his mouth nor a flutter of his lids, and certainly not enough lubrication to keep this up. Louis studies those molded lips, full and pink and smooth as wax. He thinks of the softness of Lestat’s tongue; the cool inside of his purely receptive mouth. He thinks of how cold Lestat’s fingers were in his own hot mouth, like sucking the fingers of a statue. How, like a statue, they did not seem to sense his wet yearning at all.

Louis slides Lestat’s head out of his lap. Gently, he rests the curve of his neck on his velvet jacket and shifts to take his proper place again: kneeling; and Louis’ shaking breath is louder than all the prayer in the world as he lowers his supplicant head between those thighs. 

His entire body is one big trembling. He is forced to confront it; what he desires, the shape of it in his hand. Louis, of course, is not _unfamiliar_ with any part of Lestat- they’ve known each other too long and hurt each other too thoroughly for any vulnerability to be foreign. Their bodies have frequently belonged more to each other than themselves. And he belongs to Louis more than ever now: in coming to care for him physically, Louis has discovered anew the vulnerability and control of _responsibility_. Lestat cannot decide for himself. He cannot know what he wants, or what is good for him; decisions must be made in his stead. He belongs to Louis now as an invalid belongs to a nurse, or a child to its mother. 

And no longer will Louis allow him to resist care. He closes his eyes and brings his lips brush-close to the shaft, that skin sweatslicked by his clammy palm. Lestat smells like nothing: almost inorganic, and vaguely Louis finds himself wishing for that musky, dirty sweat-smell of human men. 

But when he moves his lips whisper-soft down the vein his mouth is flooded with that unmistakable smell of _Lestat_ , that dormant blood just a fang-press away and he realizes he is salivating. Louis’ jaw is tense, he is dizzy and reeling; starved enough that his entire body seems to strain towards that vein. Shaken by the unexpected strength of the urge, he closes his eyes again, exhales heavily. He tries to forget his own hungers; to focus on the pleasure he wants so badly to _give_ ; on drawing some desire from the inertia of this dry body. His lips trace the vein to its base and he inhales heavily of the near-scentless curling golden hair there. Only the barest taste of salt on the roof of his mouth implies some life in this body beyond slumber. Louis wonders if he dreams.

Louis wonders if he dreams _of this_. Can he feel this devotion, distantly, and what would he imagine it to be? He nuzzles those curls and then, light as feather, draws the flat of his tongue up the bottom side of Lestat’s cock. Every inhale is the agonizing reminder of him, sending a wave of ache through Louis’ veins; so he concentrates on that cool skin, the devotion of his mouth, thinking that surely the heat of this shame must bring some good warmth to his lips.

There is a dim comfort, Louis thinks, in wanting to be nothing more than the elicitation of pleasure. Usually his body is an insurmountable obstacle to goodness: but this is a different meaning of _good_ . It had always been easy for Lestat to make _him_ squirm with simple sensualities (a wet kiss to Louis’ palm which continued, unbidden, up the sensitive underside of his wrist)- but the possibility of experiencing pleasure had always seemed more evil than pain. _Giving_ pleasure, though, feels entirely different- Louis is excruciatingly _present_ , physically grounded- faint taste of Lestat’s cold skin burning his tongue, smell of blood making him lightheaded as the surrender before swoon. It is like that surrender, this being just-his-body; as if he were just the blood, passive and flowing. He could make Lestat feel _good_ , if he wanted. 

Never mind that _Lestat_ cannot want. Vaguely Louis wishes he had some heat in his veins, were less hungry- more drunk- not so mortifyingly aware of _exactly_ what he is doing. When he traces the place where the skin draws back with his tongue, he swears he almost tastes _something:_ the faint saltiness of a man having a nightmare in his sleep. It is enough. 

He slips the head into his mouth and draws lightly. Louis thinks that his heavy, nervous breath might feel good to this stonecold body, almost human-hot. He thinks that his attraction is like a spell, like a thread pulling him along the labyrinth of desire straight to the minotaur. 

Louis thinks that Lestat _would_ want this, if he were here, and bobs his head down deep as if he could pull that _want_ from Lestat’s unconscious body with the pressure of his mouth. Shame has flushed his face a deep, rosy pink; he does not want to admit, even to himself, that it is a flush of pleasure. He gets about half the half-soft length into his mouth before he feels the tip of Lestat nudge the curving entrance to his throat.

It is simple to not breathe: to devote himself through not-breathing. Louis closes his eyes tight and swallows, imagining it as an infliction. But the ghost of a mortal gag reflex repels him. Unable to accommodate Lestat in the narrow passage of his throat, he pulls back; a sweatdamp curl falls in his eyes as he wipes the spit from his lips. 

Louis would like to imagine a pressure on the back of his skull which would force him past discomfort and into the territory of unselfish devotion: but in truth he cannot bear to consider what it would be like to do this to a Lestat who was conscious of it. To offer such an open adoration would be an excruciating humiliation for someone whose love has always been half-hate; Louis cannot imagine worshiping a God who might grab his head and talk back. But Lestat is slick with him, now, and Louis gives a few more strokes before he encloses the head again in his dark hollow mouth. Beneath lowered lashes he tenses, gags again and swallows; and finally feels Lestat slide achingly thick into his throat. 

And of course he gives Louis nothing. No rewarding hands in his hair or twitch on his tongue. Louis thinks _he is not present in his body_ and wonders how much he really believes it. As it is _no one_ will ever see him like this; his only witness is the night, who keeps all secrets; not even the moon is here to betray him with her illumination. He is doing a dark thing in the dark, and the darkness of his desire blends in with the blackness of despair. And though he wants Lestat to _feel_ him- to know it is Louis, and to want him- he cannot imagine that Lestat has ever thought him capable of this. David, certainly, treats him with a reverence of hands which belies some idle worship. But David barely knows him at all. 

It would be good to think of this as a _favor_. And yet Louis cannot consider: _if Lestat were here_. Staring the fantasy of his submission in the face is impossible. His dark mirror of desire has gone empty, and Louis has only ever been capable of seeing his own desires through the glass. To imagine Lestat wanting something from him is the only way he knows how to want. 

The obsessive recollection of _being wanted_ had been all that had sustained him, once; Lestat’s long hands in his curls, or creeping around his waist in public; that palm which would lie in the small of Louis’ back or heavy on the nape of his neck. How in the old days Lestat would be so obvious in his possession that Louis would have to feel the sordid shame of knowing what mortals thought they knew. How during the slow portion of a long ball, he would pull Louis half-behind a drape and whisper hot against his throat _and that one is thinking of you, and her, and him; and that one is thinking of us together, wondering what I do to you. He has ideas_. Every intimacy an invisible bruise which left behind an unfillable ache and those faint impressions of his grip which had been all that shackled Louis to life through all those years he’d spent in San Francisco, starving for anyone.

Decades- literally decades- passing around Louis as he just sat in the corners of bars and watched mens’ hands, full of loathing and envy and discovering _context._ All those years in the dark with only guilt and loneliness and abjection and even now the nape of Louis’ neck drips with sweat and aches for the weight of Lestat’s palm. But the weight of his cock is heavier and more real, now: Louis can feel him swelling to the tightness of his throat, that strange soft-stone skin warming to his August-hot mouth. He can practically taste the blood beneath, beginning to heat, to flow. His body aches, he salivates; Louis’ cold veins pine for that which runs through his. 

When he pulls the head from his mouth with a soft slick _pop_ it is pink and flushed, and the miracle of this mechanical response is the most Lestat has given him in a long time. Louis keeps his lashes lowered and presses lips to skin, dizzy with desire and flustered with his own shameful eagerness; overwhelmed by what pours out when he lets a single urge run free. How Louis wants Lestat’s blood and his love, his own death and all the life inside this man; how much he wants _this_ \- just this salient proof that somewhere, in some respect, he gives Lestat _something_. Maybe it is impossible for Lestat to want him, now. But to be fleshly and hot for him, that _is_ possible; a pleasure of the flesh that calls him back to this world, perhaps that _is_ possible; to be some link to his body, as Lestat had been Louis’ link to his own. As Lestat had taught him he _had_ a body when as a mortal Louis had been numb without knowing he was numb. When he had been unfeeling, unfamiliar with _feeling_ , only knowing what was _supposed_ to be felt; and in all his drunken fumbling with whores never realizing that when most men see a woman on her knees they are not imagining what it must be like in her place. 

How he had always hated Lestat’s victims; the women in their terror, the men in their sudden submissions and he being neither of them. Though he had hated Lestat for killing it had only been watching Lestat kill which had taught him his own unendurable wants. It had only been _being_ killed which had taught Louis yielding, the movements of his body which were natural to him; how Louis had loathed him for that. And yet, though he has conjured the image of the mortal Lestat infinite times from conjecture Louis has concluded it is just an impossible grief for impossible lives they never could have led. That mortal lordling could not have sweat over Louis on some straw bed somewhere; Louis could not have heard his ragged human voice break as he came. Under that sunlit sky, would he have even wanted him? 

Louis loathes to admit an ugly jealousy of David, who did not have to bear the burden of his _own_ body into immortality- his switch having shed the skin of his mortal repressions. How ironic the newness of David’s hands which made him clumsy as if with inexperience, when David had lived so much more _life_ than Louis ever had. Louis had discovered desire late. He had not even known what it was: only that this strange jewel, discovered in the ashes of his previous self, was the only part which had survived the immolation of grief. He had not had a name for this unburnt thing which had been buried inside his flammable self-deception, this selfish heart he had not known he possessed- this _wanting_ things for himself. 

In life, Louis had never been with another man. It seemed he had not known _how_ to want; that Louis had not even known what _want_ was until that fateful night when Lestat had come through his French window and drawn desire from within him like the unspooling of a secret thread. A ribbon had passed between them when Lestat took him, a rhythm of hunger which Louis had always wanted to think of as the beat of corruption: but the unbearable truth is that hunger had lived in his body all along. Lestat had merely shown it to him. He had opened Louis’ chest and shown him his own selfishness, a tiny flame, and said _here is the only light which does not go out_. If his blood had been pollution Louis had wanted to be poisoned; if Lestat had been Prometheus Louis had wanted so badly to burn.

And it had seemed as if that whole night had been his burning, that the summer air had been the fever boiling Louis out of his skin; it seemed the heat of the night was their heat, and that all the crickets in all the swamps in all of Louisiana were wailing a crescendo hymn as Lestat pushed the bone-white lace nightgown up his thighs. 

His angel who came to condemn him to Hell. Louis will never forgive. Lestat had taught Louis’ body pleasure with his blood and his heart how to be hungry; when he’d said _tomorrow night_ Louis had known for the very first time what _longing_ was. Why teach a starving man about food? He had treated Louis as Louis had not known a man could be treated; he’d unhallowed him with knowledge of himself. Before Lestat, he’d been a near-perfect yearner: all he had ever wanted for himself was death.

But Lestat had taught him a terrible self-understanding. He had known Louis better than anyone ever had, known his hungers better than Louis knew them. Without him Louis cannot know himself at all. Trapped with his better half he is suffocating. David wants too badly to be tender, to be _good_ to Louis. To treat him, as he says, _as you deserve to be treated._

But David does not know him at all; he could not possibly guess at the even more terrible truth: that in 1990, on the Night Island, there had come an early-morning hour when Lestat had cornered Louis fifty-feet from the common area and breathed down his neck- _Do you know how many of them_ **_want_ ** _you?_ with his hands in Louis’ sweater, _Do you know what I would do to you?-_ and Louis had been so genuinely frightened of his own natural response that he’d pushed Lestat away instead of saying: _I spent decades imagining that every man who wanted me was you._

Now Lestat has no more _want_ and Louis is just a vast insatiability; and in place of Lestat’s endless hunger is a boundless, seductive helplessness which Louis cannot help but oblige. Now it is Lestat beneath _his_ hunger: Lestat caught in _his_ teeth. The blood warms and swells him in Louis’ mouth and Louis is lightheaded with the agony of wanting. There is a new taste to his skin; something salty, like sweat, something bitter. Louis cannot help but sigh, long and longing, at the beauty of this simulacra of life. He does not need Lestat to be _present_ , just pleasured; and though Lestat is swollen in his hand he is still cool to Louis’ lips. Louis encloses the head again and swallows, wanting to feel that response; to cling to him, to be deep and tight; wondering if, to Lestat’s cold body, his mouth could perhaps feel as warm and wet and good as a living woman. 

Only by the subtle pulse pressed against his tongue does Louis realize that his heart has slowly begun to pick up.

With one hand he gropes beneath Lestat’s shirt until his sweaty palm lies directly above his lover’s near-dead heart. A little arrhythmia murmurs beneath the strengthening beats. Every muscle in Louis’ body is taut with tension; his nails have tightened to an absolute vice on Lestat’s thigh. He has gotten nothing from this man in such a long time. Suddenly Louis is afire, blind with the desire to do whatever this body wants of him, whatever will draw a reaction- willing to debase himself, to do anything at all- forgetting, in the heat of his own want that this body wants nothing. That it cannot _want_. That this is only the self-sustaining machine of Louis’ own desire. 

The scent of Lestat’s blood growing hot is actually more than he can bear. He is desperate and his knees ache from kneeling and he wants to be closer, closer-than-inside. Pulling his panting mouth away Louis abandons the position of worship (and pretense), slithers in between Lestat’s legs, and lowers his shoulders directly between those thighs.

He buries his face directly into the crotch of Lestat’s jeans and inhales deeply, all shaking hands and heavy breathing, eyes closed as he rubs his cheek against the bare skin of Lestat’s hip. No order to it, just desperation- as if nothing existed but the crease of his thigh. Louis leans forward and catches the bobbing tip with his tongue to draw it back between his lips. Between Lestat’s legs, he swallows past discomfort; and the tight unbearable tenseness of Louis’ stomach dissolves into a hot liquid rush of some almost-physical lust when suddenly under his palm he feels-

-Lestat’s hips shift, just barely, beneath Louis’ mouth; and from his chest rises a long unconscious sigh of pleasure. 

And Louis _moans_ with his mouth full as if it were him being pleasured. But it is only the _sign_ he wants. He nuzzles into the sweaty curls, smelling that heightened pulse; his body straining for that one thing he cannot have. He digs his nails into the soft flesh of Lestat’s thigh in an effort to keep from turning his head just a few inches to either side and sinking his teeth gum-deep.

In a brief moment of madness it occurs to Louis that he _could_ have Lestat inside of him, that other way: that he could climb atop this gone-cold body and guide him inside. That he could be tight around him, comparatively hot- almost living. But the idea is insane. What is he _doing_? Louis is a deep sea of repressed desires, all of which bubble to the surface when a single one slips free. Free from the shame of acting on anyone who could see how shameful he is, he is perfectly willing to be shameful; and Lestat, he reminds himself, _cannot see me. He is not here._

It would be lovely to believe that Lestat is- as David says- _aware of who Louis is_. But Louis is far-gone from the optimism of belief. Hope is a lamb lost in the stinking dark; all Louis _hopes_ for now is to be a hot mouth. To be a good sensation; for the simplicity of this physical devotion to call out through the void. 

And David is a damn fool anyway, always needling and worrying and wringing his hands and wanting so-selfishly to _take care_ of Louis when Louis does not want care. When Louis wants the opposite of care: when his desire says, _Make me desireless_ , and yet every single time David merely drains him to the point of unconsciousness and makes a noble show of shouldering the burden of refusal when Louis begs him in the heat of it to finish the job. 

And how Louis resents his reticences and kindnesses and his endless insistences that Louis take some of _his_ blood for a change. How he resents that David does not know him at all: does not recognize the strange creature he glimpses through Louis’ veil when he takes him; does not know what to do with a sufferer so used to suffering that pleasure has no meaning. It is strange to look at him, settled so well into that body, and to think that if Louis had chosen differently it would be Lestat wearing that skin. It takes a great deal of effort to imagine; but Louis still does. Sometimes, when David is in the front parlor working or reading or just being _very still_ , Louis sits in the rose-colored chair and just _watches him_. Just bores his eyes into that beautiful stolen object of David’s body and is almost, almost able to imagine. 

There wriggles behind Louis’ conscious mind an uncomfortable understanding of himself. A sound in the attic. There are names for what he does to those who love him. But what does it matter? Louis has floated so long and so far-out in the dark sea that it seems he is beyond caring about anyone or anything at all; except, of course, the sleeping body beneath him whose ribcage has begun to heave in earnest. He pulls himself away from his work to sit up, between Lestat’s legs, and from this vantage point sees the most beautiful thing in the world: a hint of furrowed brow. For a moment his whole body is tense with the strength it takes to resist the urge to crawl atop Lestat entirely.

And this time when he goes back down between those sprawling legs he does not think of David, or the watchful saints around him; does not wonder if Lestat can feel, or want; does not think of them at all. What does Louis do to either of them that he would not do to himself? What does he inflict upon David or Lestat or any of the other fools who have loved him which is not actually a dagger for his own throat? How much Lestat depends upon his mercies now! That dependency is completely seductive. _I know you want me; know you need me; know you cannot live without me, because I alone close these curtains at night,_ Louis thinks and how frequently he has thought of not closing them. He has considered a murder-suicide but no method can be sure. How frequently he has reconsidered, over these past five years, that wretched night all those lives ago: when Lestat came to the Theatre des Vampires and doomed them all begging for Louis’ succor. How different things would have been. In taking responsibility for Lestat’s damaged body, Louis suspects he may have come to _enjoy_ the delicate dependency upon him which Lestat would have developed for all his physical needs; as he had always enjoyed the responsibility of caring for Claudia.

To be rewarded for such an attentive self-sacrifice with _need_ is a favored fantasy, now, in face of what seems to lie ahead: an endless devotion to the immortal marble myth which had once been the man he loved. Louis damns his own hunger that it keeps him from staying here forever, just a pleasurable sensation to ground Lestat to the Earth. If only Louis could be his crypt-keeper, crypt-sharer; if only he needed nothing; if only he could sacrifice his own appetite, _himself_ , blur the boundaries of his being into that glorious continuity and spill himself at Lestat’s altar _forever_. 

If only he could kill without guilt knowing it was all a devotion, an indirect offering brought back to this chapel where Louis would nightly be the bag of blood that kept Lestat fulfilled. It could be good then, this hungry body; the disgusting depth of Louis’ appetite would have a _purpose_ and Lestat would never have to hurt a real person ever again. Louis doesn’t even know if he wants body or blood, only some kind of communion; doesn’t even know if he’s imagining being drunk to death or a more mortal friction, Lestat pinning him down desperate for whatever heat he could find in Louis’ insides. It is all the confusion of bloodstarved brain and touchstarved skin, how the ache in his body has reached a pitch of hysterical strength and it seems that every vein throbs with the need to be a willing sacrifice. To lose his soul this time, not just his body- for Lestat to flip him over and run his blood out _here_ over these pinewood boards like they could reconsecrate this place to the two of them; to be subsumed and succumb entirely to evil, to be truly damned, finally, and free. For Lestat to sate himself upon him forever until he had no self left to suffer: Louis imagines it would be a little like marriage. 

Louis’ traitorous heart is rushing with the memory of fangs at his ear hissing _I want to fill you up with me, I want all the blood in your body to be mine_ and his chest is tight with that complex combination of terror and _need_ when suddenly he inhales through his nose and is hit with the screaming wet red smell of Lestat, fresh-spilled: he has been digging his nails into that denim-sheathed thigh so hard that he’s cut fast-healing crescents into the flesh beneath. Louis tenses, resisting with all his strength the overwhelming urge to tear the fabric through and lick him clean. Instead he tightens his grip, wanting just this proof that it is possible to puncture his skin; experiencing that same creeping sadism which Louis first felt, all those lifetimes ago, when he had drank from that wrist on the stone steps of Pointe du Lac until Lestat’s handsome face contorted with pain. Until Lestat had torn him from his artery by the hair and in that moment nothing had mattered except how _empty_ he was without that flow of blood into his body and Louis had gone for his wrist again- glanced up accidentally- and seen that Lestat’s grey eyes were full of fear. 

He had known what was inside of Louis, then: the black-hole of want. He had seen the endlessness of Louis’ hunger and been scared he’d bleed his soul into it. Before that moment Louis had thought himself desireless, content with leading his mediocre mortality to its miserable end: only seeing himself reflected in the terror of Lestat’s eyes had he comprehended the enormity of his own appetite. And in that moment of looking clearly, for the first time, over the vast landscape of his desire, Louis had known power. 

And in this moment of inflicting that endless desire upon Lestat’s helpless beauty Louis knows it again. Knows power as he knows it with David in their moments together, David who cannot help but give Louis everything he wants; as he knew it years ago when he had promised Armand companionship and then exacted slow revenge letting him pour his soul into the abyss of Louis’ longing and lose himself trying to find the bottom of a bottomless pit. 

The depth of that longing is deeper than the abyssal lake he is named for, and darker; everyone Louis has ever longed for has drowned. It is a void so black it is as blinding as light, so empty it exerts its own gravity: an unquenchable thirst to be wanted which pulls everyone who wants him, slowly, into the black hole of his heart. That night last week when they had argued, David had nervously said: _Louis, you ask more than a man can give._ He’d stuttered: _Sometimes, you are very much like Lestat,_ and what he’d really meant was _Louis, you have a hole inside of you the size of God and we both know that the only man big enough to fill it is the one lying on that chapel floor._

On the tinny speakers of the little musicbox _Madame Butterfly_ plays out gently to its fruitless end, Cio-Cio's suicide echoing beautifully off the curved ceiling. For a while there is no sound in the vast empty convent but the soft, wet noises of Louis’ submission, breath as ragged as if he were getting anything from this besides the masturbatory pleasure of playing out a fantasy of force with the body of a man no longer capable of forcing Louis to do anything at all. Defiling and dreaming of being defiled, he enjoys that particular sadism of career sufferers: willing to inflict it to feel the pleasure of a good regret. 

If only Lestat could grow impatient with his reticence, pull him close by the throat and use him slow and hard as a bruise. Louis does not even know what kind of force he wants, only knows he wants force; and the nature of his overheated imagination is such that he almost mistakes for vivid fantasy the gentle pressure of a palm laid warm and heavy on his shoulder. 

In that curve between throat and muscle, it sits, like a soft stone. 

Louis is stopped mid-act. He blinks. He feels- the long fingers. He closes his eyes. He does not breathe. He dares not think. A thumb rubs unconscious circles at the top of his spine. 

That hand curves cautiously around. The palm slides under his hair, fingers softly scratching the base of his scalp. And then that familiar grip finds itself, lightly squeezing, at the nape of Louis’ neck. 

He is trembling completely all at once. Sweating like fever and cold at the same time. The weight of Lestat’s palm travels, slowly, up the column of his throat with a clumsy pressure- as if he were attempting to see Louis blind. For a moment it lingers at his jaw. Louis feels the grip tighten, surer this time but still delicate- as if Lestat means to tilt his chin up, make eye contact. 

But he does not. He lets go of Louis’ jaw, palm sliding upwards, exploratory, cupping the curve of Louis’ cheek. His thumb brushes against Louis’ lower lip and does not seem to acknowledge that Louis’ mouth is currently the resting place of his dick. 

Louis exhales a long, shaking exhale, and his breath must be hot after all because beneath his grip Lestat’s thigh twitches. His hips shift. Louis keeps his eyes closed, unbelieving. Slowly, he turns his head and presses his left cheek into the palm of Lestat’s right hand. 

And Lestat presses back, cradling the weight of his head. The pressure is so comforting, so welcome and long-wanted that Louis sighs a deep, unconscious sigh of pleasure at the touch. 

Lestat holds his face tenderly and Louis, filled with a feeling he thought he had forgotten, nuzzles blindly into his palm. He turns his cheek to press his wet lips to the center and hears himself whine quietly into that clammy skin. Lestat’s fingertips dig almost imperceptibly into the base of his scalp. It is an impossible contentment. It is the bone-deep warmth of miracle. It is sweeter than the touch of any saint when those fingers find their tangle in Louis’ dark, sweatdrenched curls, and that palm slides around to discover its rightful place on the back of his skull. 

Gripping him at the base Louis slides lips over swollen head and his eyes flutter, then close, as Lestat’s hand becomes firm on his scalp. Jaw achingly open and throat sore with stretch, Louis swallows him down again; and as he follows the curve with his mouth Lestat holds him there as if Louis is exactly where he is supposed to be. When that _pressure_ becomes _push_ it is an ecstatic hot delirium; his nose buried in golden hair, dizzy with the smell of blood-sweat _,_ choking a sacred suffering when those hips twitch just-barely-upwards to chase the tightness of his throat. Louis tries to recoil just for the sake of feeling the defeat and against Lestat’s easy strength failure feels like victory. It is such a relief to be ravished, a shattering of the tension which is better than release. Louis sobs around his dick with some feeling like deliverance. 

It is all hot panting and sweat-smell and soft wet noises of reverence, Louis’ muffled whining as Lestat rolls his hips in tiny circles and shallowly thrusts into his mouth. He feels Lestat’s other hand, as if disembodied, rise to rest tenderly on the underside of his throat. Lestat’s low, long breaths are heavier than Louis has heard in a long time- labored, almost as with pain; and Louis savors the pressure when Lestat grinds his nose down into his pubis, wanting to take absolutely everything he can get. 

Abruptly he shoves Louis down until he is every inch inside him and Louis is lips-to-base, retreated somewhere inside-himself into a pleasurable submission; into the rhythm of yielding and the movements of his mouth and the simplicity of purpose. It is all an ecstasy of not thinking. Of not having to think; of having no will of his own, only a will to submit to. Of being merely _a perfect sensation,_ no space in his head for grief or regret or fear. Louis sobs on the edge of desperation, willing to do anything to continue drawing those sweet responses from his lover’s long cold body and not even caring if he is used; only useful; that he can still wring those soft sighs of pleasure from a body empty as the altar and yet sensual as the fresh-dug grave.

To think that for five years this is all Louis had to do: submit to what he refuses to want. It is good even if Lestat has no conception of him, good because everything he has ever done to Lestat he would do to himself; because pain is the place where they blend together and his devotion has always been self-infliction, love Louis’ weapon of choice against himself. At this point he’d give himself to anyone who could be a dagger. Agony is the only confirmation that he isn’t dead yet. Even in the summer Louis is cold- as if his body is only the vessel of Lestat’s, as if Louis’ nerves were his nerves and felt the chill of loneliness for him. As if he can feel the grave creeping up on them: Lestat having been so cold and so unresponsive for so long that until he had reached out to hold him by the hair Louis had been quite nearly been forced to contend with the idea that he was fucking a corpse. 

The hand which had lain lightly above Louis’ adam’s apple has found its way to his face again, and Louis dips his burning cheek into that cold palm adoringly; as if his touch were a balm, as if he could get closer yet and Lestat were not already inside him. As if he could disappear into this worship and miraculously be a martyr rather than a monster. Where they touch is a feverish dissolution of boundary, hot-cold sweatslick skin dissolving into each other; Louis dissolving into him, into the space where their pleasure is the same: becoming nothing but his mouth, that place where cruelty and tenderness are one, and sharp teeth tear through soft flesh, and the one we love is the one we want to eat. Above him Lestat gasps, a great rattling intake of breath like the gasp of shock when a man surfaces from a frozen lake. And Louis feels the hand on the back of his head firm, and abruptly he is choking with his nose buried in sweaty curls as Lestat shows him how much he needs him still by coming in his mouth.

 **VI.** He spills hot across Louis’ mouth, jerking his head back on his neck by a handful of hair. And suddenly Louis’ skull is flooded with that sweet copper reek of his blood and consumption and repulsion go to war in him: senses howling with desire and disgust, he spits _hard_ : panicked by the urgent hunger of his body that begs fulfillment and terrified of swallowing even the smallest amount of Lestat’s blood. Against the empty silence of the chapel he retches, desperate to clear his mouth of that taste he wants _so badly_. A pinkish pearlescence neither the consistency of mortal semen nor immortal blood dribbles from his swollen lower lip down the front of his white linen shirt. It tastes all bitter metal and salt, almost chemical; yet distinctly alive. Unsure of whether the source be some freak biology or his own eager carelessness Louis runs the tip of his tongue over a fang and winces. Hair hanging in his eyes, he slowly lifts his head, prepared for hurt instead of relief; anger, in place of gratitude. In a daze Louis raises his eyes and is ready for any reaction except- 

- _nothing_ , but the soft and completely docile expression of a man who is deep in sleep. Like a stone angel he looks, like a doll; lips parted, face expressionless; those hands which had held Louis fallen limp and fresh-dead to his thighs. 

If there is a change it is that he is breathing long, heavy and visible. Louis stares, watching the rise-and-fall of his ribs; briefly he fancies that Lestat has just rolled off of him and is merely panting from the exertion of finishing. In lieu of believing it, he closes his eyes and imagines: as if when he opened them the vision would be made real, Lestat rolling over on one elbow and laughing, exhausted, content and sweaty and happy. 

How smug he would be, Louis thinks. He opens his eyes and sees the quiet shine of the warm candlelight on that unmoved cheekbone, the play of flame in his whitegold hair. He watches as the heaving of Lestat’s chest eases, and slows, and returns gradually again to that final rhythm of sleep. 

Louis opens his mouth, still bitter, for a moment on the verge of wholeheartedly weeping.

Or screaming. It would feel good to give in entirely; to crumble, collapse, and submit entirely to the helplessness of a good cry; to wail so loud as to shatter the stained-glass around them. It would feel very good to break.

But he does not. Without taking his eyes from Lestat’s face- as if he might move when no-one is looking- Louis raises a hand and wipes his cheek with the back of it. His knuckles come back smeared streaky red. 

The chapel is very, very quiet. With the cuff of his sleeve, he wipes his mouth. 

His hands are shaking. A heavy silence lies over the space; _Madame Butterfly_ must have ended long ago. There are sticky teartracks down Louis’ face and his lips feel hot, almost bruised. Unsteadily, compulsively, he smooths down his hair, damp and curling in the humidity. His mouth is open as if he intends to say something. But there is nothing to say, and no-one to hear it. 

He is alone in the chapel. Out of Louis’ sore throat emerges a weak incoherent sound; scratchy and more fragile than any tone he could have imagined coming from himself. His eyes stick to Lestat’s face as if he were waiting for a statue to move. But of course no magic occurs; of course not. The world around them lies silent and unchanged and without miracle. The wax-and-plaster menagerie watch silently; the icons stare their dour stares. The candles before the Reina Maria have begun, one-by-one, to burn down. Louis cannot judge whether her eyes are filled with judgement or if it is simply a stone-cold, Divine sort of indifference.

The pews are full of dust and flowers, which he ought to have cleared out long ago. But Louis likes flowers; finds their beauty comforting even when they are dry. In fact, something whispers quietly from the back of his brain, he is beginning to realize that he likes them better dead. 

_A thing of beauty,_ he thinks, _is a joy forever._ His head turns slowly on his neck. Louis’ gaze falls again on Lestat’s placid face, whose only change is that glow behind the skin: the living flush which makes his incredible stillness seem all the more unearthly. His lips are pink, tender, he almost seems a sculpt of himself, like Sleeping Beauty incorruptible, like the body of a saint. 

But blood-drinkers are flesh and fluid still: spit and sweat and tears. The smell of salt on his clothes; of the blood pumping close to the tender underside of his wrist. Louis studies the golden hair on Lestat’s forearm, exposed by a rolled-up sleeve, and thinks of all the hours of his immortal life he has spent staring at that wrist and remembering the fresh-fruit give of the skin.

Louis does not know what he is doing when he brings his own wrist, unthinkingly, to his mouth. 

He bites once. Hard. The needlepoint sting of fang turns to _tear_ when he twists. His own thin blood fills the hollow of his mouth, and he lets the familiar taste of himself drown out the lingering taste of Lestat. He does not swallow. He has no urge to: though his body wants the taste of something real, Louis’ isn’t starving for _himself_. 

And Louis knows well that this kind of self-abuse has absolutely no satiation in it. He stares into Lestat’s face, into his gently-closed eyes, and tightens his jaw on himself to the point of pain; to the point where if it were David at his wrist Louis would have to pretend the desire to pull away.

It is becoming more difficult every night to maintain the comforting lie for David that Louis does not want to be hurt by him. But his concern requires Louis perform the delicate facade of _trust_ in order to retain his autonomy. Not, of course, that David would ever force him to do anything. He is still too _good_. 

Louis is not good. Resentment burns inside him. As blood-drinkers go, David has it easy: he never gave himself away. Louis does not get to be _good_ , Louis who looked evil in the eye and said _yes;_ if only Lestat had not given him the choice. In Rio, Louis had done a terrible thing: he had let David play the older man, and forget in Louis’ arms that he is only a fledgling yet. That it is not _he_ who is guilty. 

Between he and Lestat what has been done to David is a collaborative perversion: the only way left for their love to collude. Louis feels his own blood running over his chin, in rivulets down his wrist, and lets the pain of tear become the agony of _rip_ as he stares unblinkingly at all the details of that candle-kissed face. He presses his eyeteeth down into his own wrist until his vision clouds around the edges, letting the pain pass from sensual to unbearable as they sink almost into the muscle; as he thinks of Lestat at his wrist; of himself at Lestat’s wrist on that night two-hundred years ago, and how he’d wanted then to remain attached to that wrist forever. 

He relaxes his jaw, finally, slides teeth out of flesh and lets himself pour. He presses his lips to the gash and drinks deep without swallowing, simply letting his mouth fill with his own anemic blood. Only when the flow begins to slow- the wound, slowly, begin to knit closed- does he draw tongue over flat of wrist until there is no open wound left at all. Then, kneeling beside Lestat’s body with redstained lips and a whole mouthful of himself, Louis plays Prince for the first time in his whole life. Clasping his lover’s limp, cold hand between his own, Louis closes his eyes, bends at the waist, and presses his lips to Lestat’s. 

The blood flows hot between their cool mouths; and the flame flickers on the place where, skin-to-skin, they become the same. That impossible continuity of bodies belonging to each other more than themselves. Louis thinks, if only he could remain like this forever; if this moment could just hold, for all eternity; if only he could kiss the sleep from his lips like poison and sleep himself, be the sheath to Lestat’s happy dagger and remain always in this tomb of Endymion to meet eternal night. If only it were possible to die of desire. Louis damns his body’s need that he cannot lie here forever, lips pressed to these cold lips, body to cold body as if they’d been buried together thigh-to-thigh; as if, after that first night, they had never climbed out of his coffin. 

But longing is the sickness which animates him, and no-one has ever dropped dead from wanting too much, and when Louis kisses his own blood from Lestat’s lips he does not move, does not react, those lips do not kiss Louis back. Vampirism, ultimately, is a disease of the appetite. Wanting _too much_ , or wanting _the impossible;_ or, like Antigone, wanting _everything, and all at once._

Slowly Louis draws away. He peers closely at the curve of those lips, those golden lashes, and wonders if Lestat could recognize him by taste or if he is so far-gone that the blood dripping down his unmoving throat is nothing at all. Staring at his adam’s apple he swears he can smell the pumping artery in Lestat’s neck. Shakily Louis leans in and presses a kiss to the thin skin between jugular and jaw and tries not to think of how good it would be to bite down.

Finally he sits up. Sits back, head spinning, sniffs, and swipes his face with the back of his hand. He closes his eyes and feels his dark lashes, wet and clumped, dampen his cheek. And when Louis opens them, he finally he manages to tear his gaze away. 

**VII.** He looks up into the darkness, and sees hovering above them the grotesque body of Christ on his carved cross. And suddenly Louis is wild with the impulse to wrench that wretched body from its posts, tear the statue limb-from-limb and leave it all on the banks of the Mississippi: where faith, finally just mortal wood and nails, could at last decompose in peace. Briefly Louis envisions himself drowning God and dumping his body in Lake Pontchartrain. He thinks: _mercy killing_. 

Then his green eyes slide to the grand, curving windows. He peers through the dirty stained-glass portrait of St. Therese at the stars beyond, just hanging there like useless little ornaments. 

When Louis stands his head spins and momentarily he is entirely disoriented. He blindly stumbles a few steps over the platform, feeling his shoe nudge Lestat’s torso. That body lies on his back, now: Louis looks down and into his face, peaceful, deep in sleep. He furrows his brow and thinks absently that he ought to bring a real pillow; ought to set the music to play all night. Unthinkingly, following only the muscle-memory of hands that have done this a thousand times, Louis bends, changes the tape to _La Traviata_ , sets the player to repeat and hits play. 

As he rises again, the aria slowly begins; the soprano’s voice rising like mist from the dark. Louis looks up emptily, and wipes his mouth again with the back of his hand. He cannot be rid of the feeling of wetness on his lips, the spit, the aftertaste of his own foul blood. Then he staggers over the crushed-dust flowers, breaking the ritual circle as he does- glass candles clattering loudly over the wood- and down the steps of the chancel. 

Perfunctorily, Louis makes his way to the great windows and loosens the heavy velvet drapes from their ties. He draws them closed, hushing the chapel back into peaceful, tomblike sleep. The wicks in the Stations have all burned down; only a few candles still flicker weakly at the feet of the Reina Maria. Louis’ footfalls echo in the vast space as he comes to stand before her. He stops, for a moment and watches them- how they struggle, how hard they fight to stay alive- before blowing them all into smoke. 

Louis looks up again, and, with one more slow, brow-furrowed scan of the chapel, walks quickly down the aisle and exits the whitewashed doors. 

The musty air seems to follow him into the hall. Louis wipes his mouth again. The white cuff of one sleeve is stained, he smells like his own blood- reek of sex and death in his breath- plastered in sweat, hair still a mess. He supposes he could pretend to David that he had hunted. But David, of course, will be able to tell by his cold skin that he has not. Louis considers cleaning up: considers the need for a mirror. It is possible that David might have left one behind, in his former quarters. 

He tries to think of nothing. To think only of the immediate. As he closes the chapel door behind him, Louis hears, for the very first time, an almost inaudible _creak_. 

He wipes his mouth. Then he quietly ascends another flight of stairs, passing the great rose window through whose florid colors, muted by a film of dust, the distant streetlamps cast the ghost of a multicolored glow. He realizes belatedly, by a soft, rhythmic tapping on the glass, that in the distant world outside it has finally begun to rain. 

The air grows hotter and drier as Louis rises, taking on a stale smell as he approaches that last landing accessible by these stairs. David had once resided here; the room which had become his lays just down the hall and to the left. The rain patters against the tall windows as Louis, shoes echoing, follows the hall towards the back of the building. The paint on Dora’s door is grey and peeling and has just begun to blister in the heat. Here is the nun’s cell, waiting for the nun to return. Louis would think his own presence here _funny_ , if he could think. 

The old knob turns easily; his palm leaves the crystal slick with sweat. Louis peers inside and sees the high-ceilinged little chamber exactly as David had left it many months ago: little sink, little bed, scrap of lace curtain covering one of the tall windows. Rain drizzles against the panes. On the wall, one of Dora’s beige plastic phonelines hangs off the hook, disconnected forever from its line of faith. But no mirror. Louis glances around the space; he even walks behind the bed and opens the closet, whose barren inside is unusually cold. And he thinks without thinking that he knew it would not be here. He remembers well David’s fledgling discomfort with his brand-new reflection. Sometimes he shows signs of it still: occasionally, Louis catches him double-take when they happen to pass a darkened shop window. Louis knows what must have become of Dora’s meager, antique vanity, the one that had been here when David moved in; the one he had put away himself, with all her other things, in the attic.

Louis knows where the mirror is and knows he needs to look in it. But he does not want to look. As he pulls the grey door closed, he lays his hand on the frame and catches between his fingers a Catholic-school cursive Sharpie-scrawled on the white paint: _Darkling, I listen._ His eyes move up, above the door: _myself my sepulchre, a moving grave_. Louis has no desire to have known Theodora, that Beloved of God; but he wishes to know she whom, in the last days of his lucidity, Lestat wanted so badly. To understand what he saw in her and why; to know if in Lestat’s desire lies the locus of the role that binds them. 

Now, rather than descend those stone steps again, Louis’ feet find another path. He continues towards the back of the Convent; the rain beats the tall windows, beginning to pick up. Lightning flashes, illuminating the whole hall bright as fire from Heaven. He thinks not of his destination, only of putting his feet one in front of the other: of walking until he comes to that heat-bloated white door behind which lies the hidden staircase which leads up over the Chapel and into the loft above. As he draws closer the stale smell which permeates the entire top floor grows stronger, stranger. And when he opens the door to that stairwell the stale smell is overripe, like sour milk; like something sweet gone bad. 

Louis ducks into the musty low-ceilinged passage and climbs the creaking steps until he reaches the top of the claustrophobic closet. He fumbles in his jacket for the Convent keys. There are four on this ring and it takes him a clammyhanded moment to find the right one. Louis has not used the attic key in a long time; the lock is sticky, the wood around it dangerously decayed. But the heavy deadbolt turns. When he pushes the swollen door open, Louis is hit with a heavy rush of overhot attic-air. It is thick with dust and mildew, and the smell is strong, up here; condensing, becoming clear. Something rotten. 

Particulates swirl around his feet but he does not pause at the threshold. He just doesn’t _breathe_ . The rain patters heavily on the slanted ceiling, on the roof; against the circular windows which ornament the far ends of the space and through which fall a blueish nighttime illumination. With each step Louis takes across the dusty boards there is a resounding, hollow echo. Directly beneath this loft lies the vast, empty two-story space of the chapel. Vaguely, Louis can hear _libiamo ne’lieta calici_ echoing off the ceiling beneath him, and he thinks of Lestat; lying in the tomb below. 

His loud steps bring him to the center of the attic. Around him is a sea of white, spectral and indistinct shapes: draped sheets which make the outlines of the furniture beneath seem unworldly and unfamiliar. It is easy to find his way around the menagerie. Louis consigned many of these objects here himself, five years ago; when he had redecorated the chapel for Lestat. Pressed against the wall in a corner before the far window he finds her oval mirror illuminated by the spare light from outside. The rain beats on the glass; the sound seems to surround him, to come from everywhere. He pulls the sheet away, wipes at the patina of dust with a sheet-corner. 

Louis has never been partial to his own reflection. He doesn’t want to see himself: but he is forced to ground by the blurred image of an empty-eyed and hungry-looking vampire, sickly-looking, deathly pale, whose face is still stained pink from weeping. His lips are wet and swollen, his dark hair a sweaty mess; his shirtcollar bears smears of red. He rubs the fabric between thumb and forefinger, knowing well the futility of getting even the most dilute bloodstain out of good linen; vaguely missing Lestat’s control-freak habit of getting rid of his soiled clothes without asking and buying him replacements in the same night. 

David notes Louis’ appearance but only makes a show of worry if Louis happens to wear the same shirt for an entire week. It is the attentiveness that Louis misses. He thinks of Lestat’s room in the apartment, neat, his bed made, untouched, all Lestat’s clothes in his wardrobe hanging in patient wait for his return. Louis thinks of the way those shirts sit on him- just a bit too big in the shoulders- wide in the arms- comfortable. 

With the perfunctory guilt and self-disgust and dissociation of a post-kill cleanup Louis cleans himself up. Spit and a handkerchief. Smooth down the hair, rub the tear-tracks from the face. His clothes are barely stained, and a subtle adjustment of the jacket hides it well; but Louis will definitely be rid of everything he has worn tonight. Every article that touches his skin feels dirty in a way he suspects will not wash out. There is blood-tinged spit- or some fluid- under his nails, around his cuticles, and he cannot banish the intermingling aftertaste of Lestat and himself from his mouth; the _unclean_ feeling. Louis scrubs at his lips with the emptyeyed intensity of someone who truly does not know what he is doing. Then, staring at his own face, he becomes confused. All the movements are strange, disconnected; they seem arbitrary; his reflection does not seem like his. Louis’ hands move without him willing them to, his eyes shift oddly, his face does not look like his face. He stares intently into his own blown pupils and tries to spot himself, to see the reflection of a reflection; to see anything that resembles him at all. But it seems he is not there. He is focusing intently on trying to see the green which has gone from his irises when he realizes in a strange moment of disconnection that he is looking for the color that his eyes were when he was mortal. He is looking for a color that no longer exists within him. 

He is staring into his own pupils and trying to measure the depth of the darkness behind them when, in that reflection of the shadowy attic behind him, Louis sees movement. 

He does not turn around. He thinks: it is nothing. He looks into the mirror; slowly, his gaze moves towards the edge of the frame. 

It is nothing, Louis thinks, and yet: it persists. Barely there, in the dark- a weird shifting. Just a point of deeper darkness in the room. Indistinct. Yet it seems that nothing is _something_.

The mirror is set in one corner of the attic and reflected in its glass is the far-corner, that portion of the wall which- four years ago- had been opened up during renovations necessary for the integrity of the building. By the time David had seen the attic the beams had been rotten; mortal contractors had been necessary to make sure the roof of the chapel would not eventually collapse in on Lestat. It had been those mortal contractors who had discovered the tiny, hidden space behind the drywall, a room too small for a person with a single window whose location had previously been a mystery. But within that hidden place had been the real mystery which had caused such a sensation amongst their group after Louis’ one ill-fated trip to attic: a little dress, a little pair of oxford shoes. A little pair of knickers, girls’ size five, all boarded up together inside the wall. 

In that corner before that open portion of the wall is a humanoid shadow that stands about three-feet-tall. 

Louis forgets not-to-breathe, inhales sharply and immediately regrets it: a mouthful of that putrid stench fills his skull with the very intimate smell of something very, very rotten. His head swims, but he doesn’t move. He just locks his eyes on the reflection of the thing and watches its uncertain edges waver. The boundaries between it and the rest of the darkness are not clear. 

Every muscle in Louis’ body is stiff with abjection. His breath comes in shallow gasps. Somehow he knows that no matter how long he stares at the reflected figure, no detail will become distinguishable that will make it into a person. He thinks of Lestat in the chapel below, sleeping like a great drugged doll; he watches the deeper-darkness, the not-thing; he does not turn around. In the mirror he watches the reflection of his filthy mouth unconsciously form the first two syllables of a name which would, if he spoke it whole, be like an incantation. 

A flash of lightning illuminates the attic all at once except for that nothing so nothing it is _something_ and Louis nearly jumps out of his skin and then it is gone. He wheels around frantically and stares dead into the darkness- nothing. Just a normal dark corner. He is across the attic in a second, crouching with his hands in the dust as if he could find its impression there on the floor. Nothing, just nothing. Louis rises, turning in place; inhales; and realizes that in this corner he can breathe. The rot was never coming from here. Never coming from this obvious hole in the wall. Completely rattled, he stalks back across the attic, smelling it stronger- stronger- every step he gets. By the time he lays his hands on his own reflection he is mad like an animal- grabbing the mirror in a fury and almost shattering the glass as he yanks it away from the wall behind it, and as the smell hits him all at once Louis retches- staggers back, thunder rattling the rafters as he stares at the flow of living rot which is hundreds of roaches and maggots pouring out from the fist-sized flaw in the boards.

Whatever is rotting in there has been doing it a long time and Louis is gone in an instant- across the attic, slamming the wooden door behind him, forgetting to lock it- and down the steps. Only when he is on the landing with the door to the stairway closed tight behind him does he stop, breathless as if he needed to breathe, and retch again- unable to shake the stench which was every bad thing at once, every kind of horror, every rot- like sour milk, like mouldering offerings, like two women decomposing in an oven on a hundred-degree New Orleans night. 

A corpse-smell. David must have put the mirror over the flaw thinking it was only a flaw: a polite gesture to cover what seemed merely to be an unsightliness. A kindness performed by a man who could not know that there was something living there, in the darkness; something capable of suffocating.

He crosses the building, passes Dora’s room, or David’s- does not look back. He quickly descends the winding staircases of St. Elizabeth’s, his shoes a soft, rapid patter on the stone steps, rapid as the rain on the windows. He does not raise his head to see the face of any saint or angel or Christ on any landing. He hurries to the ground floor, through the long hall which leads to the back of the building, and fumbles through locking the door behind him as he stumbles out into the wet New Orleans night which has sunken, under wispy summer rainclouds and the watchful light of the stars, into a blue-velvet darkness. 

Louis stands in the back garden of the Convent and inhales deeply, letting the light drizzle fall on his face. He breathes in the scent of damp grass and wet cobblestone, petrichor. He realizes he is panting very hard and stops- takes long, shaking breaths. The living green smells of the overgrown herbs seem to cool his head, to flow through him cleanly; to clear, for the first time, some of the lingering taste of blood from his mouth. 

Thunder rumbles quietly over the Garden District, any menace it could have lost in the catharsis of finally-broken humidity. The night smells alive. Louis closes his eyes, making an effort to feel the rain on his face, neck and hands. He inhales long and slow of the organic perfumes of plants, weeds and flowers, small animals hiding in the darkness; and somewhere far off the faint individual scents of human bodies, human blood. The pattering rain, the chirping crickets, the quiet squirming insects in the rotting ruins of St. Elizabeth’s are a calming, sustained hum which puts some bearing back into his body. They seem to be the singing night itself, calling out softly for Louis to re-enter it.

He keeps his eyes closed and thinks of nothing until his head stops spinning, until he can feel his feet on the ground and his hands hanging limply at his sides. And slowly Louis becomes aware of himself, aware of his body and its limitations; where his skin ends and the night begins. Finally, he begins again to feel the familiar ache in all his veins. Finally, Louis is pulled back into his body by that straining hunger which eclipses all reason and all higher thought into nothing but craving for the kill. 

That pain is a sweet companion and he sinks gladly into its arms. There cannot be concern or fear, or consideration of implication, when his entire body begs for satiation. He is throbbing with denial and he is nothing but the throb. Louis is glad he has not eaten, tonight, grateful for this sensation which puts him at home in himself. Comfort is an anesthetic, a numbing agent. To know the boundaries of itself a body needs to hurt. And Louis has always loved to draw it out, anyway, to hold his hunger close to his chest; to put off the pleasure for as long as he can so that, passing through the dark streets of New Orleans in a haze, he can walk with his suffering by his side as if were the quiet but palpable presence of a lover.

David is probably back at the Rue Royale by now, he thinks. It is his first clear thought. David is probably home and worrying. David has probably hunted, and is fulfilled; has gone about it with the normal ease of a man who is not so much in love with easeful death as Louis has always been. But it has been the great romance of his life. For Louis the void has its sensual, siren song; and often he finds himself lingering at its precipice, looking with devotion into the comfortable dark, until a gentle tug upon his collar- a soft insistence- tears his face away.

On the verge of sleep the abyss calls, saying, _come rest;_ and he wants to wade out into those dark waters, to find the place where his feet do not reach the bottom and sink. But his heart is a persistent flame which will not suffocate. _Want_ tethers him; and pain is the tie that will not yet let him leave this body behind. Too moored to drown, Louis would like to immolate: to burn beyond the point of pain, to be a brilliant light of agony for a moment and then burn out. Without the pyre he is an incomplete sacrifice yet. _Fire seemed the right end for hunger,_ said Glück. _They were the same thing._

He will not make it through another summer. Even the longest coldest nights of winter can be beaten back by the warmth of another man; but here, heat is inescapable. By 1800 New Orleans retained almost none of its original French architecture. Two great blazes had taken their toll on a city built of wood; and the soggy little colony of Louis’ youth was rebuilt with Spanish wrought-iron into the grand Quarter where his life, postmortem, had finally truly begun. Like those heat-blasted buildings his body is just fertilizer for something better. Like that old French city which burned just as soon as it lit, Louis knows he is only the driftwood of himself: waiting for a merciful match. 

As David is forced to care for him now, Lestat had cared for him long ago when this place was still swamp. When Louis ate rats Lestat had begged him to feed on humans; when Louis stopped eating even rats, he’d taken more direct methods. One florid new-moon Summer evening in 1794, Louis had wandered New Orleans in a delirium of hunger until the screaming need of his flesh blocked out all the beauty of the night; until he knew not where he was. When he had laid down by the riverbank, it had been to look at the meaningless stars and pray for death.

But Lestat had come in a panic before dawn, all covered in mud and reeking of bogwater like he’d waded through every quagmire in the dirty city to find him. Shoes ruined, velvet jacket filthy, blonde hair full of leaves and flowers he’d come, fallen to his knees beside Louis and clutched him to his chest: and Louis had not realized, at the time, that this was the first time he had ever heard Lestat cry. Not after the burning of Pointe du Lac had he cried, not after his father’s death. But he wept, then, so quiet Louis could barely hear it, from simple relief. Louis had been too far-gone to understand it. _How dare you,_ Lestat had repeated, over and over, as he held Louis there in the mud on the banks of the Mississippi. _How dare you!_ The unspoken: _How dare you try and destroy what’s mine._

And then he had been all bluster, all thin bravado covering unsure command: _Louis, you are going to do what I tell you, you are going to listen to me._ But when he’d cut his wrist Louis had refused him. And so Lestat had bitten his own tongue in a fury, pulled Louis’ face to his with two hands and kissed him hard, refusing to stop until Louis capitulated and took that mouthful of his blood; kissing him until Louis had finally become lucid enough to realize what they were doing, there, in the sleepy predawn by the edge of the river, and pulled away so consumed with horror that he had not even realized how his body had been animated by desire- how he’d been alive, it seemed, for the first time since he had died. 

Lestat had wanted to carry him and Louis had said no but been too weak to refuse. Lestat had carried him. He had taken Louis back to their hotel room like a drunk, stripped off their ruined dirty clothes, put Louis in his own coffin and climbed in with him. And as the sun had risen over the city and Louis had slipped again into easy oblivion, Lestat had held him close to his chest, ran his hands through Louis’ filthy hair and in a moment of unusual weakness told a story about himself. 

It was all a pale memory which Louis had not recalled, from the edge of that death-sleep, until two-hundred years later in 1985 when he had read the full tale of Lestat’s botched self-burial in the very memoir which Lestat would later admit to having written for him. 

But on that night, all those years ago, Louis had not understood. He had not been capable of understanding. Too young and exhausted and self-pitying. All he had understood was the press of Lestat’s heart against his nightgown-clothed sternum, the strength of it, the rhythm; and the way Lestat had shaken him awake just before dawn with an intensity in his eyes that Louis could not yet name. How he had held his face, staring into his eyes in the coffindark and said: _I know what you are trying to do, Louis. And I will never let you do it._

In the way Lestat had cared for him, his most precious possession, and Louis had not understood it to be care. And now, standing in the back garden of St. Elizabeth’s, looking up at those same meaningless stars that hung over this city two-hundred years earlier, Louis thinks of that selfish, senseless insistence upon _life:_ that futile hope for which there is no place in the world. And he wonders about the love which, still, refuses to release him. 

And he thinks of David and all _his_ insistences; David who never knew the pleasure of yielding, who never _asked_ for death. David, who, terrified of the depth of Louis’ surrender, would do anything at all to save him from that final surrender which is all that Louis has left to want. 

He follows the cracked slate path around the building and out of the overgrown yard of St. Elizabeth’s, locking the gate behind him until tomorrow’s inevitable rituals. And Louis goes out into the soft Summer night thinking of David, knowing what he wants and exactly how to get it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Originating as the sickly twin to 'the flood', this fic developed a nasty life of its own which haunted me for months; by the end of its writing process it had become a full-blown poltergeist. In beta it was called I CAN WARM THAT COLD SKIN OF YOURS. It destroyed my house and now I am passing the curse on to you. 
> 
> I must thank my dear beloved beta without whose infinite patience and pep-talking nothing would have gotten done; Anne for use of her trauma sandbox; and everyone who was so generous with their comments regarding 'the flood.' (I apologize for making you responsible for this.) If you've read this far, thanks to you too.
> 
> The referenced Louise Glück poem is 'Inferno': "Not the end of need but need/raised to the highest power."


End file.
